Yeshayahu Leibowitz on the State and Religion


From the Leibowitz archive in Hebrew

  1. #1 by Joachim Martillo on November 4th, 2009

    I met Leibowitz at Lowell House when I was an undergraduate at Harvard.

    He was not much of a thinker. You should probably contrast him with Talal Asad: KABOBfest: Talal Asad: Thinking about Religion Belief and Politics

    At Lowell House Leibowitz expressed very bigoted and racist attitudes toward Poles, and his ideas were littered with voelkisch racist concepts.

    His issue with Ben-Gurion is rather superficial.

    Yes, Ben-Gurion wanted to subordinate religion Jewish religion to the state, but more fundamentally Zionism rewrote Jewish religion into ethnic narcissism, state worship, and Holocaust obsession. Because Leibowitz was in many ways an ethnic narcissist himself, he never really addressed the real issue.

    Leibowitz did not understand that Zionism was Judeo-Nazism long before the 1967 opposition: Zionism, Fascism, Nazism for Dummies.

  2. #2 by Joachim Martillo on November 4th, 2009

    In the last sentence, I meant “occupation” and not opposition.

(will not be published)

  1. No trackbacks yet.